Lord of Minecraft on GamesIndustry.biz (registration required) is a quick conversation with Markus "Notch" Persson about Minecraft, his successful sandbox game. One answer they highlight separately is his explanation of why he's been so public about the boatloads of money the game has been earning, reportedly as much as $350,000 a day. "Personally I like sharing that information, because I'm generally an open guy," Persson told them. "But it feels a bit sometimes like it's a bragging page." And while he is willing to consider selling DLC for the game, he rejects the idea of courting investors: "I'd rather have [the games] just be self-funded, because we can run the company we want. If we fail with a game it's because we failed it, not because we had to rush it to meet a deadline."

|oR|jonvall wrote on Nov 25, 2010, 20:03:I don't get it! I played the free version, both single and multiplayer, but the point escapes me! I understand that you can build things but is that all there is? I heard something about running from skeletons...no clue.

I played on a mp server and it seemed as if there was crap built everywhere....I just don't get it. What the hell am I missing here?

Single player is more the "campaign" type game. You start from scratch and build up a place to live while avoiding the baddies at night (or deep underground).Multiplayer is where people cooperate to build, I don't think there's baddies. If you've seen those videos of things like Minecraft Earth, thats a multiplayer server creation.

This is the best explanation of the single player game I've seen (its basically a trailer):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaMTedT6P0IThis one should be on the frontpage of the minecraft website, instead of that totally stupid cart thing.

I think whats happening is that its getting official skin support built in, and thats just an HD skin. However, it would have to support HD textures to have HD skins working, so yeah, its HD support in an offhand way

Silicon Avatar wrote on Nov 25, 2010, 22:31:Minecraft is fun, but it has garnered so much attention that in 18 months there are going to be clones of it everywhere - and some of them will be better than what Notch can do.

The thing is, he's also made so much money that he doesn't have to care, so...

He might wake up one morning, look at the code, look out his window, and realize that he could be taking a 6 month vacation in the Caribbean.

Thats fine with me... if he puts those people he recently hired to work doing minecraft fixes/updates in those 6 months. He has enough money to delegate some work now (he could always hire a couple extra programmers if needed).

Clones are also fine with me, I'd love to see more sandbox games out there. Dwarf Fortress was kinda a precursor to this and I wasn't able to get much into that. I much prefer this and would love to see it get more in depth towards the realm of dwarf fortress type depth. There's far too much consolification and FPSes out there, I'm happy to see other games and I like sandbox stuff.